Mark Moore Fine Art proudly presents “News / Paper”, an exclusive online ARTSY survey of the artist’s most acclaimed body of work by artist Kim Rugg. With the precision of a surgeon, Rugg dismantles and reassembles printed objects that relay information rendering their original content meaningless.

What really interests me is how when I remove the message – the news – I am left with the messenger. The process brings this messenger to the foreground. The “personality” and character of the paper is therefore amplified. – Kim Rugg (2003)

British artist Kim Rugg has gained recognition and acclaim for her work that altered and “re-ordered” the average daily newspaper in a strange, obsessive pursuit of purity and order. Rugg uses everyday materials such as stamps, sweaters, wallpaper, comic books, and newspapers to examine meaning in relation to construction, by taking apart and dissecting existing objects into their components in an incredible obsessive process, her reordering highlights systems of information and questions their content.

In this exclusive online ARTSY exhibition we focus on these classic “Newspaper” and “Magazine” works that put the artist at the vanguard of the conceptual art scene in her commentary of the the role of the media in society nearly two decades ago.

With surgical blades and a meticulous hand, Kim Rugg (b. 1963, Canada) dissects and reassembles newspapers, stamps, comic books, cereal boxes and postage stamps in order to render them conventionally illegible. The front page of the LA Times becomes neatly alphabetized jargon, debunking the illusion of its producers’ authority as much as the message itself. Through her re-appropriation of medium and meaning, she effectively highlights the innately slanted nature of the distribution of information as well as its messengers. Rugg has also created hand-drawn works alongside wallpaper installations, both of which toy with authenticity and falsehood through subtle trompe l’oeil. In her maps, Rugg re-envisions the topography of various states, countries, continents, and even the world without borders, featuring a staggeringly precise hand-drawn layout with only city names and regions as reference points. In own sense of abstracted cartography, Rugg redistributes traditional map colors (or eliminates them entirely) in order to nullify the social preeminence given to constructed territories, and highlight the idea that our attention is manipulated to focus on the powerful few instead of the physical many.

Rugg received her MFA in Sculpture from the Royal College of Art (London). Her work can be seen in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art (D.C.) and the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation (CA), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (CA), Honolulu Museum of Art, the Norton Museum (FL), and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (TX) among others. She has been included in exhibitions at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art (CA), Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), Galerie Schmidt Maczollek (Cologne), and Nettie Horn Gallery (Manchester), P.P.O.W. Gallery (NYC), and was the recipient of the Thames and Hudson Prize from the Royal College of Art Society in 2004. She lives and works in London (UK).

For additional information on this artist and exhibition, please visit our website at markmoorefineart.com or contact us directly at: info@markmoorefineart.com